...Excerpts...
Quotes that either tell about eating disorders, or don't seem to really say anything
about eating disorders (or the mindset of eating disorders), unless you look for it.
Too often the shrinks assume an eating disorder is a way of avoiding womanhood, sexuality, responsibility, by arresting your physical growth at a pubescent state. But more recently, some insightful people have noticed that some of us may be after something quite different, like breathing room, or, crazy as it sounds, less attention.
-Wasted; by Marya Hornbacher
If you drink so much from a bottle marked "poison," it's almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later.
-Alice, from Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
The shrinks have been paying way too much attention to the end result of eating disorders- that is, they look at you when you've become utterly powerless, delusional, the center of attention, regressed to a passive, infantile state- and they treat you as a passive, infantile creature, thus defeating their own purpose. This end result is not your intention at the outset. Your intention was to become superhuman, skin thick as steel, unflinching in the face of adversity, out of the grasping reach of others. "Anorexia develops when a bid for independence on the part of the child has failed." It's not a scramble to get back into the nest. It's a flying leap out.
-Wasted; by Marya Hornbacher
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
-Alice, from Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
You just don't get it like you just get a cold; you take it into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root. Most people develope anorexia more abruptly than I do, but a lot of people travel seamlessly between bulimia and anorexia, torn between two lovers. This is what I did. I wanted to be an anoretic, but I was already seriously addicted to bulimia and couldn't just up and leave it. I felt like I was going out of my mind. My head was never quiet. Quiet is an in-between point, implying a balance between noise and silence, between the strange blackouts I began to have-pure silence, not sleeplike but deathlike-and the hellish shrieking jumble of my own thoughts and the voices of the world. And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said. You've got to get thinner.
-Wasted; by Marya Hornbacher
But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of Thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. You wish for that invisible, vibrating wire that hums between lovers, implying a private touch. You wish for such a wire, humming between you and Thinness, at a party, on the street, humming softly between you and death.
-Wasted; by Marya Hornbacher
I pulled my thighs apart to seee how they'd look when I got skinny, pinched hard at the excess, tried to smother the wellspring of terror that rose in my chest when I thought: I'm fat
-Wasted; By Marya Hornbacher
"Do you want to get well?" They'll [doctors] ask. You'll shrug and look at the scale, wondering how off it is, whether it will lie and tell them you weigh three pounds more than you actually do. You will be obliged to correct it, on principal, to save your soul, and for your pains you will find yourself with a new address, Eating Disorder Unit, Eighth Floor, having confirmed their suspicious, because who, with a pusle of forty-three and a systolic pressure careening vertical swoops, gives a flying fuck if the scale is three pounds off? An anoretic, that's who. Does she care that she's dying? Hell, no.
-Wasted; by Marya Hornbacher